As 2025 draws to a close, one theme has defined the year: Artificial Intelligence (AI). No matter where you looked or who you talked to, AI was front and center, from CLE seminars and conference keynotes to news coverage and industry reports.
The recent release of the American Bar Association’s “AI Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence Report” marks the second in a series of reports addressing AI’s impact on the legal profession. The report covers a wide range of topics, from AI adoption and its effect on access to justice, to how law schools and the courts are approaching AI.
A Crossroads in Legal AI Adoption
One of the key conclusions of the report is that the legal profession has reached a crossroads: AI adoption has surpassed understanding. The majority of legal professionals now use AI, but do not fully appreciate the practical and ethical challenges that arise with its use. As the report’s authors explained, “the conversation has shifted from whether to use the AI technology to how to use it.”
According to the report, legal professionals are currently using AI for relatively simple tasks such as summarization, document review, drafting brief documents, and issuing client alerts. This aligns with the findings of the upcoming 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report, indicating that AI implementation in law firms focuses on routine work, with top tasks including drafting correspondence, general research, and brainstorming.
Cost as a Barrier to Advanced AI Usage
This pattern of AI use helps explain why cost will play a significant role in the next phase of AI adoption. As AI tools improve and concerns around risk and reliability decrease, practitioners will seek to apply additional AI tools to more complex legal work. However, affordability will largely determine their ability to do so, with firm size playing a crucial role.
AI has the potential to level the playing field, enabling solo and small-firm lawyers to compete more effectively with larger firms. However, as the legal industry moves towards a stratification of firms into various degrees of technology ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ many advanced legal AI tools remain prohibitively expensive. Without changes to pricing models or policy intervention, larger firms will continue to hold their competitive advantage.
Extending AI’s Reach to Access-to-Justice
The cost dynamic extends beyond law firms into the access-to-justice space, where AI offers tremendous unrealized potential. The report cites a Berkeley-led study documenting over 100 real-world AI use cases in legal aid, including ratings, recommendations, and estimates of efficiency gains. However, high subscription costs for the best and most reliable legal AI tools might render them unaffordable and inaccessible to the access-to-justice community.
AI in Legal Education: A Shift in Curriculum
The report also highlights another area where AI’s promise has not been fully realized: legal education. Historically, law schools have been slow to integrate technology into their curricula. However, the pervasiveness of AI is starting to reverse this trend.
Until recently, most law schools turned a blind eye to AI, leaving students to fend for themselves. Students from 16 schools, including prestigious institutions like Harvard Law, UCLA School of Law, and the University of Miami Law School, filled this gap by forming student-led groups devoted to understanding AI’s impact on the profession.
Fortunately, this trend is changing. Fifty-five percent of law schools now offer AI-focused courses. Another 83% provide hands-on AI experiences like clinics or labs, and Case Western Reserve Law School even requires all first-year students to obtain legal AI certification. Recognizing that AI isn’t going away and will only become more ubiquitous, law schools are finally treating AI literacy as a core professional skill rather than an optional add-on.
The Future of AI in the Legal Field
The legal profession is entering a pivotal phase where AI’s impact can’t be ignored and must instead be accommodated. It is already part of more basic workflows in law firms. The next stage of adoption will determine whether AI benefits those who need it most or follows the money to the top of the food chain. Will it expand access to legal services and improve the quality of representation, or instead reinforce existing gaps across our profession and system of justice? Only time will tell.
Note: This article is inspired by content from https://abovethelaw.com/2025/12/lessons-from-the-abas-second-report-on-the-next-phase-of-legal-ai/. It has been rephrased for originality. Images are credited to the original source.